Transcription Note: Mr. Prutschi's report has been
arbitrarily split into six parts for easier access and
retrieval. knm.

The story is told of the Jew who, on being captured by the
Nazis, was dealt eighty brutal blows by his captors and yet
managed to live to tell the tale. This survivor carried with
him not only the memory and the pain of those eighty blows,
and what he and his people underwent during the Holocaust,
but also the fear that the suffering of the Jews would not
be believed because the inhumanity that they underwent was
unfathomable. To him that would constitute the eighty-first
blow.

The Nazis, while committing mass murder, were covering up
their tracks so that the Jewish story in fact would not be
believed, and they would get away with their crime. They
carried out their program in secrecy. They developed a whole
vocabulary to mask genocide in euphemism. Transportation to
death was referred to as emigration, repatriation, or
resettlement in the east. Murder of Jews was referred to as
special treatment or special action. The annihilation of the
Jewish people came to be known as the final solution. The
disappearance of the Jews off the face of the European earth
was to be made, for future generations, as puzzling a
mystery as the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

The final solution did not wholly succeed. The Nazis lost
the war and the story of the Holocaust has very much gotten
out. But the eighty-first blow has been struck nonetheless,
in a manner more vicious than the survivor could have
anticipated. Rather than the survivor's story not being
believed because the level of inhumanity was
incomprehensible, the story is actually being denied. And
there is an international movement engaged in that denial.

Holocaust deniers contend that for mass murder to have taken
place there had to be a 'super weapon.' That super weapon
was the gas chamber. They proceed to assert that not a
single human being was gassed to death by the Nazis.
Gassing, they argue, was purely used for disinfection. Only
thousands of Jews died during the Second World War and these
perished as the unfortunate victims of the exigencies of
war, mainly at the end of the conflict. There was no policy
of genocide.

Even in its broad strokes Holocaust denial is deliberately
misleading. It focuses exclusively on gassing as the sole
means of murdering Jews, when there were a series of other
methods. The
einsatzgruppen, or mobile SS killing squads,
followed the German army as it advanced eastwards, and
engaged in mass shootings which claimed the lives of well
over one million people. The deniers do not speak of the
crowding of Jews into ghettos or of the labour in the
concentration camps, and the deaths that resulted from
starvation, disease, and brutality.

The deniers, in their questioning of gassing, deal only with
Auschwitz, which was both a slave labour camp and an
extermination camp. Nothing is said of the other factories
of death:
Chelmno,
Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and
Majdanek.
These were small points on the map - non-descript, tiny
villages -to which trains took hundreds of thousands of
Jews, and returned empty. The deniers are silent on the use
of gas vans. And they do not speak at all of the Nazi
euthanasia program against their own "Aryans" in Germany
itself. Tens of thousands described as mentally or
physically infirm by the Nazis were gassed to death, setting
the precedent for the use of gas against the Jews in a
massive way during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust deniers are individuals with an idee fixe.
They reject all evidence which undermines their so-called
thesis. Documents and photographs are all forgeries.
Survivor eyewitnesses are all victims of mass delusion and
indoctrination. Confessions of Nazi war criminals are
invalid because they were all extracted by torture or were
the result of plea bargaining. The scholar Nadine Fresco has
looked at the work of the Holocaust deniers, and written
that in their "research the only ethic is suspicion...
distrust is the only certitude." This does not make for a
workable, honest methodology of history.

In history you do not begin by attaching yourself to a wild
theory and then reject anything that flies in the face of
it. Yet the Holocaust deniers want to portray themselves as
disinterested truth seekers, real historical researchers.
That is why they choose to refer to themselves as
"historical revisionists."

The revision of history is a legitimate pursuit. Every
generation takes a new look at its past and revises it
somewhat in the light of new evidence, new perspectives.
When engaging in such reinterpretation, historians ask
themselves what happened, how it happened, why it happened.
They do not deny the events themselves.

Historians, for example, when looking at the dropping of
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, might ask themselves
why it was necessary; how was the decision made; could it
have been avoided; could the Japanese surrender have been
obtained in some other way. No historian suggests that bombs
were not dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that the whole
thing was an invention by the Japanese to extract
reparations and to get the United States to rebuild their
country's economy; that the survivors of those nuclear
holocausts are simply suffering from delusion.

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